The Sunday Age's state political editor.

After $180 million in taxpayer funds and years of political angst, the most bungled computer system to hit Victorian schools has finally been switched off.

The state government has confirmed the IT experiment known as the Ultranet has officially ceased, ending one of the most controversial projects ever rolled out in public education.

The software was intended to transform the way students learn by providing parents with information about their child's lesson plans, giving teachers a place to collaborate and share their curriculum, and allowing students to set personal goals and get feedback online.

Instead, it was plagued with tender problems, blew out by three times its original budget, and ultimately proved so clunky only 4 per cent of the intended 1.5 million teachers, parents and students decided to use it.

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Computer giant NEC has taken over the program, rebadged it under the name of GenED and is giving schools the chance to keep it - provided they pay for it out of their own budgets.

But despite insisting ''many schools have signed on'', the company refused to tell Fairfax Media how many are involved, how much they have to pay, or whether there are plans to sell the software, which could result in the education department recouping some costs, albeit a small proportion of the original price tag.

Education Minister Martin Dixon said his department ''had worked hard to extract whatever value we can for Victorian schools from this failed Labor program'', adding that the project was ''botched from conception to implementation''.

It is not the only technology disaster to cost Victorian taxpayers millions of dollars over the years. The myki ticketing system was more than three years late and $350 million over budget. The HealthSMART program, which was meant to ''revolutionise'' the way hospitals dealt with patients, and the LINK police database were also plagued with problems and cost blowouts of $140 million and $100 million respectively.

And in the education portfolio yet again, a student administration program for TAFEs to keep records of their enrolments and finances came under the spotlight last year after blowing out from $66.9 million to almost

$100 million within four years.

Victorian Principals Association president Gabrielle Leigh described the Ultranet as a ''brave concept'' that some primary schools were happy to try out, ''but in the end it was all too hard and there were so many stumbling blocks''.

''It just didn't work out because of the size of the school system,'' she said. ''The notion of us all being connected together was a grand idea, but [now] that the department is no longer providing it, schools don't really have the money to pay for an extra such as that.''